Is Pokevision Down For Good? Why Pokémon GO Tracker, Third Party Maps Were Suspended By Nintendo, Nantic

Children play Pokemon Go in Central Park as Pokemon Go craze hits New York City, July 29, 2016. Photo: Getty Images/Michael Loccisano

The creators of Pokémon GO have doubled down on their decision to block third party applications from accessing the game’s data, leaving many who enjoyed those features wandering around aimlessly in search of their Pokémon.

Of course, wandering around staring at your smartphone appears to be a key feature of the game to begin with.

Niantic, the development studio behind Nintendo’s Pokémon GO augmented reality smart phone game, issued a statement Tuesday saying that the third party applications — the most popular of which, Pokevision, showed users where exactly they can find specific Pokémon in real time — pose technical problems for the game and run contrary to their underlying goals. The developers also eliminated a native feature that showed roughly how far Pokémon are through little footprints.

Here’s the full text from the statement:

Trainers,

As many of you know, we recently made some changes to Pokémon GO.

- We have removed the ‘3-step’ display in order to improve upon the underlying design. The original feature, although enjoyed by many, was also confusing and did not meet our underlying product goals. We will keep you posted as we strive to improve this feature.

- We have limited access by third-party services which were interfering with our ability to maintain quality of service for our users and to bring Pokémon GO to users around the world. The large number of users has made the roll-out of Pokémon GO around the world an... interesting… challenge. And we aren’t done yet! Yes, Brazil, we want to bring the game to you (and many other countries where it is not yet available).

We have read your posts and emails and we hear the frustration from folks in places where we haven’t launched yet, and from those of you who miss these features. We want you to know that we have been working crazy hours to keep the game running as we continue to launch globally. If you haven’t heard us Tweeting much it’s because we’ve been heads down working on the game. But we’ll do our best going forward to keep you posted on what’s going on.